Space Cadet

August 12, 2008

The first three features directed by Laurent Cantet—“Human Resources,” “Time Out,” and “Heading South”—all dealt with closed spaces (a factory, a modern office complex, and a Haitian beach resort); his fourth, “The Class” (“Entre les Murs”—literally, “Between the Walls”), is set almost entirely within the confines of a single classroom in France. It won the Golden Palm at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, and has been chosen as the opening-night presentation of the New York Film Festival, on Sept. 26, at the Ziegfeld Theatre. Beside its cinematic merits, it gives movie critics something new to aspire to: becoming a movie star. The notion of a critic becoming a director is the founding trope of the French New Wave, but François Bégaudeau, the former Cahiers du Cinéma critic and high-school teacher who wrote the quasi-autobiographical novel on which Cantet’s film is based, also plays the leading role, as the teacher in a tough Parisian lycée, alongside a group of students who are also nonactors. Here’s the trailer.—Richard Brody

—Richard Brody

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